Fracture

Posted: 10/08/08

In the future, you can shoot guns to raise or lower mounds of earth and throw grenades that cause pillars of rock to erupt from the ground. At least, that’s the promise of Fracture, the latest third-person shooter from LucasArts. Does it make for a solid gameplay mechanic or does it give the game a shaky foundation?

In the 22nd Century, global warming has caused the oceans to flood the central United States, separating the East coast from the West. Those crazy Californians begin to genetically enhance their bodies to survive, prompting the government to ban such activities, and a civil war is launched. As an Alliance soldier, it’s your task to capture the Pacifican president and end the invasion into Atlantic territory.

Fracture’s plot is a paper-thin attempt to make the game relevant to current events. It’s never convincing, and it’s hard to care about the flat central characters. Making matters worse, one of the revelations in the epilogue makes the whole ordeal feel somewhat pointless.

Fracture’s single-player campaign takes place in three lengthy acts from San Francisco to Washington DC. Once you’re acquainted with your terra-forming equipment, you’ll use your abilities to scale walls, dig through tunnels, and solve light puzzles to advance. The campaign is fairly linear without much in the way of side routes, but players can search for purple data files to unlock features in the game’s weapons testing sandbox.

Fracture also features several online modes. There’s standard death match, capture-the-flag, and territory style options as well as excavation, which has both teams competing to dig up buried markers. If anything, they’re a nice change of pace from most shooters that thrive on kill counts.

You’ll get eight to ten hours from the campaign, and the pace keeps moving with new abilities, new game mechanics, and even a few vehicle sections.

Terrain deformation is the main hook, and it has a significant impact on the gameplay, making it feel more like an adventure game than a straight-up shooter. The entrencher device that raises and lowers the earth is mapped to upper shoulder button with grenades and guns mapped to the bottom.

You can raise the ground or toss a spike grenade to reach high platforms, lower the ground to dig under walls, use the earth to push up bridges, or dig trenches to guide rolling bombs. In combat, your entrencher is an essential tool that allows you to create instant cover in heated fire-fights, and in tight tunnels you can even use earth to crush enemies against the ceiling, which is especially cool.

Fracture also has a great set of weapons in addition to standard assault rifles, rockets, and sniper rifles. There are torpedos that glide underground, ricocheting explosives, freeze rays, and vortex grenades that draw massive amounts of enemies and debris into a swirling twister. One of the coolest weapons is the Lodestone gun, which draws nearby objects to a single focal point, allowing you to crush enemies with crates, boulders, or local wreckage.

However, Fracture’s gameplay struggles when it comes to enemy design and AI. The Pacificans you shoot along the way are all slotted in at pre-determined points, and barely deviate or react when getting shot. Even more challenging opponents like the flying hydras and quick cheetahs are more annoying than difficult as they jump quickly between three or four predictable points on the map.

Sometimes enemies, including bosses, completely forget about you, stop attacking, and just stand out in the open waiting to be shot. The game also loses steam towards the end with a repetitive series of puzzles and a disappointing final boss.

If you enjoy games as toys to tinker around with, Fracture is a fun physics playground with lots of room to experiment. It’s just a shame that the game part feels unfinished.

Fracture’s terrain system requires a certain suspension of disbelief. While enemies and crates can go flying, you can’t shake the foundations of any major structures. The overall look of the game and its characters is woefully generic with frog-throated green men and a main character that onlookers may mistake for Too Human’s Baldur. Certain cutscenes are also clearly pre-recorded and poorly compressed, showing ugly artifacts, but the soundtrack is good throughout, matching what you’d expect from a Lucas production.

With its terrain-deforming mechanics and physics-based weaponry, Fracture features some creative gameplay ideas and can be a lot of fun, but unfortunately that creativity isn’t matched in the art direction, story, or enemy AI. There’s definitely something here that could be turned into a great game, but it’s execution falls short of its promise.

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